Let's take an example: I call the sony customer service, saying that I installed their beta driver for their digital camera for FreeBSD for which they offer no warranty at all and it doesn't work... Would they send me a new camera for free?
If it was an official Sony driver, they better damn send me a replacement. Remember, this was an Apple iPod, running with an Apple driver, that seemed to work just fine before something happened that caused it to stop working.
Look at some of the people here. They were arguing with me that the iPod was cross-platform. "Use it as a hard drive to move files between Mac and PC" was something I heard quite often.
I hate Mac zealots. Period. And damn near every Mac user seems to be a diehard zealot.
Let me assure you that if Apple keeps up that kind of support, they WILL go out of business sooner rather than later.
Most successful companies have excellent customer support. For example, I called Philips about a Sonicare toothbrush charger that quit working. I did not wait on hold, did not have to argue, didn't even have to wait. They asked me for the serial number, confirmed that it was still under warranty, and shipped me out a new toothbrush with Fedex the same day. The box it came in had a prepaid shipping label for returning the old one. No fuss, no hassle, no problems whatsoever. Even though the damn things are way overpriced, I would still buy one just for the quality of support you get from them.
If Apple wants to be more user-friendly than Microsoft and Dell, they will have to beat their customer service. After all, you just don't pay top dollar for a music player with marginal customer support. I would have really expected Apple to treat their customers well, not be rude to them.
Windows is quite a decent OS. I wouldn't diss it so much. Now, their business practices are a different story, but I wouldn't diss the product too much. Nobody made an OS yet that runs on the same range of hardware and has the same capabilities.
Basic interface? No, you'd have to reimplement the whole camera. Also, an FPGA design would run you out of business very quickly. Just the FPGA would cost more than the camera does right now.
Nice. Except that you will have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing custom ASIC chips and such. Which is rather cost-prohibitive, when you can go with the cheap off-the-shelf variety. Which is what ritz did -- they used an off-the-shelf design and exactly the same chips as extremely cheap 1mp cameras.
Also, if someone will actually bother to make a custom USB cable, they can probably use a microcontroller as well.
No company will ever adopt macs systemwide, at least in the near future. They suffer from the same problems as Windows boxes, and are also more expensive. Switching to Macs from Windows just doesn't make any business sense. Linux is a totally different story.
Remember: the driving force behind any switch will be corporate desktops. People generally run the same thing on their home machine as they do at the office. It doesn't work in the opposite direction (just look at apple's market share). And OS X will not be showing up on company computers very soon.
I was surprised to find no comments at all concerning OSX, wrt the future of linux on the desktop. I mean, if anything in the last two years has obviated the need for linux on the desktop, this is it.
You just don't get it, do you? As far as I'm concerned, OS X is not any better than MS Windows. It's a proprietary OS coming from a proprietary company. Sure, it's "UNIX-based" -- just like Windows 9x is DOS-based. Its only selling point, apart from aesthetic appeal, is ease of use and stability. But it's still (and will always be) a closed, proprietary system. Not to mention that Windows 2000/XP is not that much worse in those two aspects.
The main point of Linux is that it's a free and open system. It's not in the same category as OS X, Windows, OS/2, or AmigaOS. Don't compare it to those systems.
Hey, retarded assmonkey: get with the program. Nobody needs firewire when the player has USB 2.0. Not to mention that only Macs come with firewire built-in.
Read the article, you dumb fuck. It says SPECIFICALLY that it has a mic (which the ipod lacks), there IS a remote, and that it's made by Creative and not some taiwanese company. As for prettiness: I believe the iPod (and most other apple stuff) is the epitome of "ugly". The iPod is only compatible with Windows and Mac, so it's not cross-platform, either. And you can use it with pretty much any music service that supports WMA, of which there are several.
Implicit definition? What the fuck are you talking about? Do you not know that the metric prefix "kilo" means 1000, or have you simply never taken a chemistry class? Please grow a brain before replying.
Bad system. A barcode is not human-readable. You might prevent a compromise of one machine, but if you also compromise the verification kiosk the problem is solved. A much better solution would be for a computer to fill out a conventional ballot for you. You then look at it, see if it filled it out right, and deposit it into a ballot box. These can later be optically scanned or hand-counted to verify the election.
If an artist sells 10,000 albums but earns $5 per album, they make the same amount without necessarily being known to the "average" person.
Artists hardly make any money off of albums. Concerts and other publicity events are much more profitable for them. And if you don't sell too many albums, you won't get all the airplay, publicity, and so on.
Of course, the artists are charged by the recording industry for the recording costs.
Obviously, the recording industry is not a charity, but a business. Nevertheless, nobody forces the artists to go to a label to publish their music. The fact that they do so anyway speaks volumes about both the relevance of the services music companies provide.
Oh yeah, there's marketing work. Which the artists and Apple already do without them
Apple markets music about as much as Wal-mart markets cola beverages. They are both retailers, not marketing operations. There is such a thing as in-store marketing, but its effect is very small, especially for online shopping.
So what's the hard part that the recording industry does again? I've got some friends who have a band, and they'd really like to know.
The key thing the recording industry could do for them is get me (and others) to listen to and buy their music. I am not aware of any band that became successful (as in, the average person knows they exist) without a record label.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Doing nothing? Really? Looks like you've been smoking some good stuff lately. Music companies actually produce the music you buy off of iTMS. Apple is the company that essentially does nothing. How expensive is it to run a couple of servers and develop bloatware? It isn't, my crack-smoking friend. Now, finding good artists, recording them, and selling their music is the difficult part, and that's where the recording industry comes in.
No need to bother with emulation. Just learn a bit of C, read some of the official USB specification, and write your own driver program (using USB Snoopy on windows to see what gets sent to the hardware). It took me a weekend to write a driver with libusb, and that's with virtually zero prior knowledge. Now granted, it isn't a proper driver per se, but it works.
You actually changed your tune this time. In the original post, you said that being short caused submissiveness in an individual due to some genetic phenomenon (the "hardwired" part). Now you're saying that submissiveness is due to the perceptions of others. Which one is it?
But seriously, roasting someone for "spewing unsubstantiated bullshit", then making three separate unsubstantiated claims yourself in your next three sentences is pretty rich.
Excuse me, but my pointing out the patently ridiculous claims in that post does not necessitate _proving_ them wrong. And I did provide a counterexample or two.
Being taller is a dominance trait. It's not rocket science. It's biology.
You're spewing unsubstantiated bullshit. Please don't call it biology. The notion that people are genetically or otherwise hardwired for dominance or submission can be clearly demonstrated to be wrong. It may be believable in animals that rely solely on instincts, but extending it to intelligent species, such as humans, is clearly incorrect. You are ignoring too many variables. As for height being genetically correlated with leadership: that's just plain wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about capabilities. It's not about percentages.
Let's take an example: I call the sony customer service, saying that I installed their beta driver for their digital camera for FreeBSD for which they offer no warranty at all and it doesn't work... Would they send me a new camera for free?
If it was an official Sony driver, they better damn send me a replacement. Remember, this was an Apple iPod, running with an Apple driver, that seemed to work just fine before something happened that caused it to stop working.
Nice one. Let me guess, the Mac zealots that infested Slashdot will mod this one down in 3..2..1...
Look at some of the people here. They were arguing with me that the iPod was cross-platform. "Use it as a hard drive to move files between Mac and PC" was something I heard quite often.
I hate Mac zealots. Period. And damn near every Mac user seems to be a diehard zealot.
Let me assure you that if Apple keeps up that kind of support, they WILL go out of business sooner rather than later.
Most successful companies have excellent customer support. For example, I called Philips about a Sonicare toothbrush charger that quit working. I did not wait on hold, did not have to argue, didn't even have to wait. They asked me for the serial number, confirmed that it was still under warranty, and shipped me out a new toothbrush with Fedex the same day. The box it came in had a prepaid shipping label for returning the old one. No fuss, no hassle, no problems whatsoever. Even though the damn things are way overpriced, I would still buy one just for the quality of support you get from them.
If Apple wants to be more user-friendly than Microsoft and Dell, they will have to beat their customer service. After all, you just don't pay top dollar for a music player with marginal customer support. I would have really expected Apple to treat their customers well, not be rude to them.
Windows is quite a decent OS. I wouldn't diss it so much. Now, their business practices are a different story, but I wouldn't diss the product too much. Nobody made an OS yet that runs on the same range of hardware and has the same capabilities.
Basic interface? No, you'd have to reimplement the whole camera. Also, an FPGA design would run you out of business very quickly. Just the FPGA would cost more than the camera does right now.
Nice. Except that you will have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing custom ASIC chips and such. Which is rather cost-prohibitive, when you can go with the cheap off-the-shelf variety. Which is what ritz did -- they used an off-the-shelf design and exactly the same chips as extremely cheap 1mp cameras.
Also, if someone will actually bother to make a custom USB cable, they can probably use a microcontroller as well.
No company will ever adopt macs systemwide, at least in the near future. They suffer from the same problems as Windows boxes, and are also more expensive. Switching to Macs from Windows just doesn't make any business sense. Linux is a totally different story.
Remember: the driving force behind any switch will be corporate desktops. People generally run the same thing on their home machine as they do at the office. It doesn't work in the opposite direction (just look at apple's market share). And OS X will not be showing up on company computers very soon.
I was surprised to find no comments at all concerning OSX, wrt the future of linux on the desktop. I mean, if anything in the last two years has obviated the need for linux on the desktop, this is it.
You just don't get it, do you? As far as I'm concerned, OS X is not any better than MS Windows. It's a proprietary OS coming from a proprietary company. Sure, it's "UNIX-based" -- just like Windows 9x is DOS-based. Its only selling point, apart from aesthetic appeal, is ease of use and stability. But it's still (and will always be) a closed, proprietary system. Not to mention that Windows 2000/XP is not that much worse in those two aspects.
The main point of Linux is that it's a free and open system. It's not in the same category as OS X, Windows, OS/2, or AmigaOS. Don't compare it to those systems.
Airport Security Employees
What do they have to do with the government?
Government enforced cable monopolies Government enforced telco monopolies
The government does not enforce any monopolies. It's just kinda hard to put in two cable networks to the same damn house.
Standardized testing in schools
Usually done by a private corporation.
FEMA
Whatever.
The war on drugs.
Guess what, most people support it.
DMCA
Written by Hollywood execs.
Hey, retarded assmonkey: get with the program. Nobody needs firewire when the player has USB 2.0. Not to mention that only Macs come with firewire built-in.
Read the article, you dumb fuck. It says SPECIFICALLY that it has a mic (which the ipod lacks), there IS a remote, and that it's made by Creative and not some taiwanese company. As for prettiness: I believe the iPod (and most other apple stuff) is the epitome of "ugly". The iPod is only compatible with Windows and Mac, so it's not cross-platform, either. And you can use it with pretty much any music service that supports WMA, of which there are several.
Implicit definition? What the fuck are you talking about? Do you not know that the metric prefix "kilo" means 1000, or have you simply never taken a chemistry class? Please grow a brain before replying.
Read my post again, you fucknut.
No, it is not a different unit. 1 kcal = 1000 calories = 1 Calorie = 4.184 kJ. Both joules and calories are measures of energy.
Bad system. A barcode is not human-readable. You might prevent a compromise of one machine, but if you also compromise the verification kiosk the problem is solved. A much better solution would be for a computer to fill out a conventional ballot for you. You then look at it, see if it filled it out right, and deposit it into a ballot box. These can later be optically scanned or hand-counted to verify the election.
judging from what I've heard on radio the last few years, you have been smoking some really bad crystal meth!
Sure, but then most of the indie stuff is even worse.
If an artist sells 10,000 albums but earns $5 per album, they make the same amount without necessarily being known to the "average" person.
Artists hardly make any money off of albums. Concerts and other publicity events are much more profitable for them. And if you don't sell too many albums, you won't get all the airplay, publicity, and so on.
Of course, the artists are charged by the recording industry for the recording costs.
Obviously, the recording industry is not a charity, but a business. Nevertheless, nobody forces the artists to go to a label to publish their music. The fact that they do so anyway speaks volumes about both the relevance of the services music companies provide.
Oh yeah, there's marketing work. Which the artists and Apple already do without them
Apple markets music about as much as Wal-mart markets cola beverages. They are both retailers, not marketing operations. There is such a thing as in-store marketing, but its effect is very small, especially for online shopping.
So what's the hard part that the recording industry does again? I've got some friends who have a band, and they'd really like to know.
The key thing the recording industry could do for them is get me (and others) to listen to and buy their music. I am not aware of any band that became successful (as in, the average person knows they exist) without a record label.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Doing nothing? Really? Looks like you've been smoking some good stuff lately. Music companies actually produce the music you buy off of iTMS. Apple is the company that essentially does nothing. How expensive is it to run a couple of servers and develop bloatware? It isn't, my crack-smoking friend. Now, finding good artists, recording them, and selling their music is the difficult part, and that's where the recording industry comes in.
No need to bother with emulation. Just learn a bit of C, read some of the official USB specification, and write your own driver program (using USB Snoopy on windows to see what gets sent to the hardware). It took me a weekend to write a driver with libusb, and that's with virtually zero prior knowledge. Now granted, it isn't a proper driver per se, but it works.
define "intelligent"
Capable of rational thought or reasoning.
I'm corellating submissiveness with shortness
You actually changed your tune this time. In the original post, you said that being short caused submissiveness in an individual due to some genetic phenomenon (the "hardwired" part). Now you're saying that submissiveness is due to the perceptions of others. Which one is it?
But seriously, roasting someone for "spewing unsubstantiated bullshit", then making three separate unsubstantiated claims yourself in your next three sentences is pretty rich.
Excuse me, but my pointing out the patently ridiculous claims in that post does not necessitate _proving_ them wrong. And I did provide a counterexample or two.
Being taller is a dominance trait. It's not rocket science. It's biology.
You're spewing unsubstantiated bullshit. Please don't call it biology. The notion that people are genetically or otherwise hardwired for dominance or submission can be clearly demonstrated to be wrong. It may be believable in animals that rely solely on instincts, but extending it to intelligent species, such as humans, is clearly incorrect. You are ignoring too many variables. As for height being genetically correlated with leadership: that's just plain wrong.